Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

I cleared our dinner dishes and arranged some of Mrs. Mansour’s fruits in a bowl, placing them at the center of the table. Ed reached before he saw what was inside.

“Surprise,” I said.

“What— atis? Santol? ” He peered closer. “Where did you get these, Sal?” He broke open a sugar apple, scooped out one of the inner pods, and began to suck.

“Mrs. Mansour.”

“Not bad! Did she have them flown over by private jet? How is it the ants didn’t get to them first?”

“I don’t know.” I was grateful for the fruit, whose fragrance sweetened the kitchen and seemed to absorb my husband’s odor. According to Ed, though, it was the Indians who stank. “The pipe will spring a leak one of these days,” he liked to say, “and I won’t even smell it for all the Bumbai around me. The stench of curry armpit will have knocked me out.”

I blurred the focus of my eyes until Ed became a set of disembodied sweat stains in front of me: the spots under his arms, the gleaming oily patches on his cheeks and forehead, the tie that grew darker as it looped around his neck. Only by the sounds of him eating the fruit — the slurping of pulp and spitting out of seeds — could I tell that my husband was still there. With my fingernail I punctured the skin of a rambutan to expose the white jelly inside.

—

On our second morning together I began to train Aroush’s eyes. I placed a doll and a flashlight beneath the heavy, floor-length tablecloth in our dining room and carried Aroush under. She began to cry. As I soothed her in the dark, I noticed how much she smelled like her mother — that pleasing scent of tangerine mixed with something stronger. When the moaning stopped I shone the flashlight upon the doll, a few feet in front of us. “Do you see the pretty little doll, Aroush?” I had fallen into the special-needs teacher’s habit of narrating each minute as it happened, of repeating myself, of asking questions Aroush could not answer. “Do you see?” I peered around at Aroush’s face. Her eyes were as aimless and agitated as ever.

I had been taught that senses were the doorway to skills. In the kitchen I held against Aroush’s tongue a pretzel-shaped teether that had spent the night in the refrigerator. She shivered. “Good girl!” I hugged and kissed her. An older, less impaired child I could have rewarded with raisins or candy; Aroush, who had never eaten solid food, I could only praise and love. I exchanged a cold teether for one that had steeped in a pan of warm water since morning. A furrow appeared between Aroush’s brows at the change in temperature, and I practically attacked her with cuddling.

By the time her mother arrived, Aroush was in her chair, and I was holding the flashlight two feet from her eyes. “Where is the light, Aroush?” I said, moving the flashlight slowly from side to side. “Do you see it? Aroush, follow the light with your eyes.” Again it was I who felt in the spotlight, with Mrs. Mansour there.

She applauded. “Now a flashlight; in time, a telescope. Isn’t that right, Teacher?”

“We have lots of work to do,” I said carefully, “before we start thinking about telescopes.”

Mrs. Mansour gave no indication that she heard me or understood. Lifting Aroush from her chair, she saw a plush rattle on the coffee table. “Toys, Teacher?” she said, with some concern. “Will my girl learn from baby toys?”

I picked up the rattle and shook it. “Auditory stimulation will develop her receptiveness to sound,” I said, “which is precedent to the acquisition of language.” In my earliest days of teaching I would sometimes hide behind jargon this way, learning quickly that a crowd of syllables could soothe the most anxious parent. It seemed to work on Mrs. Mansour, who smiled again and handed me a velvet pouch.

“Teacher, do you believe in miracles?” she asked.

Inside the pouch I found a choker: pearls as large and heavy as marbles, with a bluish silver tone to them. “In Libya they have built a river where there was no water. A pearl is only sand before it turns to precious stone. Then there is the flood, the burning bush, the tree in our desert that has lived four hundred years on nothing.” She took the choker from my hands and reached over to secure the clasp at the nape of my neck. “They say only children can believe such stories. Me? I believe. Like a child, I believe.” Her fingertips were cool, and some of their coolness seemed to linger in the pearls at my throat after she had gone.

—

Minnie came to visit me on her next day off, arriving as I lay Aroush prone on her rubber mat.

“Make yourself at home,” I said. “I’m just giving her some exercise before a nap.” I bent and straightened Aroush’s knees, then cycled them in the air. Her feet, unlike the rest of her, were normal, even perfect: smooth and plump as any little child’s, free of tumors or thumbprints. Her tiny toenails were painted a shade of pink darker than her dress.

Standing at a distance from us, Minnie swiped one of the shelves in my living room with her fingertip, reflexively checking for dust. Again she reminded me, in spite of her own childlessness, of my mother. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said, looking over at me while I massaged the backs of Aroush’s tumored palms, trying to coax her fingers to open and stretch. “My job’s no walk in the park, mind you. But at least when I polish the glass, it shines.”

I extended Aroush’s arms and turned her head from side to side. Minnie disappeared into the kitchen, and I could hear her opening the refrigerator and cupboards. “Please don’t bother, Minnie,” I called. “Relax and put your feet up.” It was her habit during daytime visits to prepare a dinner I could just reheat when Ed came home.

By the time I had put Aroush to sleep Minnie was wiping down my kitchen counters. “Pot’s in the fridge,” she said. “ Afritada. Just put it on the stove when Ed’s ready to eat.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Is she asleep?”

I nodded. We went into the den to watch television and ate the last of the sugar apples before they could rot. On screen, women with mink coats and feathered hair said evil things to one another.

“We’re going on strike,” Minnie announced.

“We?”

Some Filipinos had banded together, she explained, wanting the Ministry of Foreign Labor to raise both the minimum wage and the age ceiling for new incoming workers. “They’re even calling themselves a union,” she said, though the group was loose and informal and, like its members, had little real status in the world it hoped to change.

I thought of how she’d walked into my house and checked the curio shelves for dust. “Minnie, you just spent your day off cooking my husband’s dinner,” I said. “I can’t imagine you on strike.”

“You mean you can’t imagine me chanting or holding up a picket sign,” she said. “But not everybody does that.” The union had floated other, subtler strategies. Withholding smiles, for one. It had worked for a group of cashiers in Italy, omitting a personal gesture that appeared nowhere in their job descriptions but nonetheless brought management to its knees. “It’s time they felt it,” Minnie said — softly, like a timid child learning to speak. “How their lives would be without us. How this piece of sand would sink into the Arabian Gulf!” The rallies I attended in my youth had sounded a lot like that.

Aroush began to cry. I stood up, setting aside my glass and bowl. “I’ll just go see if I can get her back to sleep,” I said apologetically. “Be right back.”

In the living room, Aroush had soiled her diaper. I gathered her embroidered dress gingerly at her waist while changing her. A drop of soupy infant excrement leaked onto the carpet on my way to the trash. By the time I had washed my hands and scrubbed the stain, Minnie was at the doorway with her bag, putting on her shoes. “I just remembered something I promised to do for the church,” she said, which sounded like a lie. On most visits she lingered at my house as long as she could, sometimes through dinner. More than likely, I guessed, she hadn’t counted on hearing and smelling Aroush on her day off.